Mississippi’s Top Court Says Rights Violations Are OK If Cops Don’t Know How To Do Their Jobs

Legal Issues

from the why-even-try-to-know-what-you're-doing dept

There are things you can and can’t do when setting up checkpoints. If it’s DUI enforcement, you can talk to drivers and see if they seem intoxicated. If it’s near a border, you can stop every vehicle to search for undocumented immigrants or contraband.

What you can’t do, however, is just set up a checkpoint to stop all cars just to eyeball the interiors and question occupants in hopes of discovering contraband or evidence of illegal activity. That’s pretty much the same thing as entering every house on the block to search for criminal evidence. Just because cars aren’t houses and are traveling on public roads doesn’t give the government the right to engage in some “general rummaging.”

This much was made clear in the Supreme Court’s decision in City of Indianapolis v. Edmond.

 In a 6-3 opinion delivered by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the Court held that because the checkpoint program’s primary purpose was indistinguishable from the general interest in crime control, the checkpoints violated the Fourth Amendment. “We cannot sanction stops justified only by the generalized and ever-present possibility that interrogation and inspection may reveal that any given motorist has committed some crime,” wrote Justice O’Connor.

The city argued it had a justifiable reason for these checkpoints — during which occupants were questioned and drug dogs performed open-air sniffs: drug interdiction. Not good enough, said the Supreme Court.

And yet, law enforcement agencies seem convinced they can still do this sort of thing. They can’t. Not legally. But they can get away with it, especially if they hand the job to the officer with the least amount of experience.

Once again, ignorance of the law is the best excuse… at least if you’re a cop. That’s the upshot of this Mississippi Supreme Court decision [PDF], brought to our attention by FourthAmendment.com.

In this case, two Puckett, MS police officers set up a “safety checkpoint” at a four-way intersection connecting two local highways. Lavern Kendrick was stopped and questioned by Officer Adam McGuffee. McGuffee claimed Kendrick was nervous, that he smelled “burnt plastic” which he took to be indicative of meth use, and happened to see a meth pipe inside Kendrick’s car. One thing led to another, which led to Kendrick’s arrest, and this suppression motion.

The trial court saw no problem with any of this, even though Officer McGuffee testified that this checkpoint was mostly exploratory, allowing the officer to check licenses, registration, insurance, and “then whatever is seen in the vehicles.” That alone should have put it out of constitutional bounds, especially 23 years after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Edmond.

But the lower court decided the cop was just too ignorant to understand what he was doing or saying, and credited the officer’s inexperience, rather than decide it was a clear and obvious violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Following the hearing, the trial court acknowledged that Officer McGuffee’s testimony “was a little bit all over the board about the purpose for the stop.” The trial court stated that it was not surprised by this because Officer McGuffee

“…was the most inexperienced law enforcement officer for the Town of Puckett. That’s not his fault. That’s just the nature of what it is. He started in January of 2023. He’s a part-time worker. He does other work primarily. This is a part-time job for him.“

In other words, the less a cop knows, the more they can get away with. Kendrick argued more logically that McGuffee’s testimony during the trial made it clear the real purpose of the checkpoint was “general crime control,” rather than just ensuring drivers were properly licensed and insured.

Unfortunately, the state’s top court agrees with the lower court: inexperience is a halo.

We find that the record supports the trial court’s conclusion. With permission from the chief of police, Officer McGuffee and Officer Lathum set up a safety checkpoint, the primary purpose of which was to check that each driver passing through it was properly licensed and insured. Evidence was presented that this was a routine safety checkpoint and that every vehicle passing through was briefly stopped.

The primary purpose of checking driver’s licenses and insurance cards substantially outweighed the minimal intrusion of Kendrick’s individual liberty. And the safety checkpoint did not violate the search-and-seizure provision of either the Fourth Amendment or the state constitution.

And there it is: if a cop doesn’t have the experience to do this job properly, he can just blunder around and allow the court to undo the constitutional damage he has done… at least in Mississippi. My guess is these “safety checkpoints” are really the kind outlawed by the Supreme Court’s Edmond decision but McGuffee just hadn’t been on the job long enough to know to how to better hide this fact from trial courts while testifying. He did his job just poorly enough to salvage an illicit possession/DUI bust. And the state’s law enforcement get their free pass on shady checkpoints extended.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, checkpoints, ignorance of the law, mississippi